/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14682770]

Daily reminder that the aesthetic experience is the highest pursuit in life

[Anonymous No.14682792]

Catholicism is the mixture of aesthetic kino and self sacrificing virtue

[Anonymous No.14682800]

Elaborate
please :)

[Anonymous No.14682858]

>>14682792

Nah, you're thinking of Chivalry. Catholicism is reading other people's interpretations of a multi-thousand-year-old "holy book" and living out your hedonism according to what your predecessors deemed "acceptable heresy." Also, it has nice artwork. But the virtues, that's what inspired the artwork, not the religion. You can become the embodiment of chivalry without being Catholic, and without being cringe for that matter.

[Anonymous No.14682871]

>>14682770
isn't this the basis of the reevaluation of all values?

[Anonymous No.14683041]

>>14682770
Read Kierkegaard and get btfo'd

[Anonymous No.14683253]

>>14682800
Reading Wagner.

http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wlpr0126.htm

>ONE might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognising the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation. Whilst the priest stakes everything on the religious allegories being accepted as matters of fact, the artist has no concern at all with such a thing, since he freely and openly gives out his work as his own invention. But Religion has sunk into an artificial life, when she finds herself compelled to keep on adding to the edifice of her dogmatic symbols, and thus conceals the one divinely True in her beneath an ever growing heap of incredibilities commended to belief. Feeling this, she has always sought the aid of Art; who on her side has remained incapable of higher evolution so long as she must present that alleged reality of the symbol to the senses of the worshipper in form of fetishes and idols,— whereas she could only fulfil her true vocation when, by an ideal presentment of the allegoric figure, she led to apprehension of its inner kernel, the truth ineffably divine.
>It was otherwise with the Christian religion. Its founder was not wise, but divine (1); his teaching was the deed of free-willed suffering. To believe in him, meant to emulate him; to hope for redemption, to strive for union with him. To the "poor in spirit" no metaphysical explanation of the [215] world was necessary; the knowledge of its suffering lay open to their feeling; and not to shut the doors of that, was the sole divine injunction to believers.
>Our best guide to an estimate of the belief in miracles, will be the demand addressed to natural man that he should change his previous mode of viewing the world and its appearances as the most absolute of realities; for he now was to know this world as null, an optical delusion, and to seek the only Truth beyond it. If by a miracle we mean an incident that sets aside the laws of Nature; and if, after ripe deliberation, we recognise these laws as founded on our own power of perception, and bound inextricably with the functions of our brain: then belief in miracles must be comprehensible to us as an almost necessary consequence of the reversal of the "will to live," in defiance of all Nature. To the natural man this reversal of the Will is certainly itself the greatest miracle, for it implies an abrogation of the laws of Nature; that which has effected it must consequently be far above Nature, and of superhuman power, since he finds that union with It is longed for as the only object worth endeavour.

[Anonymous No.14683259]

>>14682800
>>14683253
>We have nothing here to do with the astoundingly varied attempts of speculative human reason to explain the nature of this Son of the God, who walked on earth and suffered shame: where the greater miracle had been revealed in train of that manifestation, the reversal of the will-to-live which all believers experienced in themselves, it already embraced that other marvel, the divinity of the herald of salvation. The very shape of the Divine had presented itself in anthropomorphic guise; it was the body of the quintessence of all pitying Love, stretched out upon the cross of pain and suffering. A—symbol?—beckoning to the highest pity, to worship of suffering, to imitation of this breaking of all self-seeking Will: nay, a picture, a very effigy! In this, and its effect upon the human heart, lies all the spell whereby the Church soon made the Græco-Roman world her own.
>the Saviour's birth by a Mother who, [218] not herself a goddess, became divine through her virginal conception of a son without human contact, against the laws of Nature. A thought of infinite depth, expressed in form of miracle.
>but the mystery of motherhood without natural fecundation can only be traced to the greater miracle, the birth of the God himself: for in this the Denial-of-the-world is revealed by a life pre-figuratively offered up for its redemption. (3) As the Saviour himself was recognised as sinless, nay, incapable of sin, it followed that in him the Will must have been completely broken ere ever he was born, so that he could no more suffer, but only feel for others' sufferings; and the root hereof was necessarily to be found in a birth that issued, not from the Will-to-live, but from the Will-to-redeem.
>But that picture of Raphael's shews us the final consummation of the miracle, the virgin mother transfigured and ascending with the new-born son: here we are taken by a beauty which the ancient world, for all its gifts, could not so much as dream of; for here is not the ice of chastity that made an Artemis seem unapproachable, but Love divine beyond all knowledge of unchastity, Love which of innermost denial of the world has born the affirmation of redemption. And this unspeakable wonder we see with our eyes, distinct and tangible, in sweetest concord with the noblest truths of our own inner being, yet lifted high above conceivable experience. If the Greek statue held to Nature her unattained ideal, the painter now unveiled the unseizable and therefore indefinable mystery of the religious dogmas, no longer to the plodding reason, but to enraptured sight.

[Anonymous No.14683286]

>>14682800
>>14683253
>>14683259
>Heidegger: Wagner and his effect on mass culture, excoriating his swoon-inducing compositions as part of the modern role of art as fulfilling the ever-hungrier cravings for excitement and raw feeling as a distraction from the ever-increasing emptiness of the age.

>On Schleiermacher: The specific functions of the ego, as determined by the relative predominance of sense or intellect, are either functions of the senses (or organism) or functions of the intellect. The former fall into the two classes of feelings (subjective) and perceptions (objective); the latter, according as the receptive or the spontaneous element predominates, into cognition and volition. In cognition, thought is ontologically oriented to the object; and in volition it is the teleological purpose of thought. In the first case we receive (in our fashion) the object of thought into ourselves. In the latter we plant it out into the world. Both cognition and volition are functions of thought as well as forms of moral action.
>It is in those two functions that the real life of the ego is manifested, but behind them is self-consciousness permanently present, which is always both subjective and objective — consciousness of ourselves and of the non-ego. This self-consciousness is the third special form or function of thought — which is also called feeling and immediate knowledge. In it we cognize our own inner life as affected by the non-ego. As the non-ego helps or hinders, enlarges or limits, our inner life, we feel pleasure or pain. Aesthetic, moral and religious feelings are respectively produced by the reception into consciousness of large ideas — nature, mankind and the world; those feelings are the sense of being one with these vast objects. Religious feeling therefore is the highest form of thought and of life; in it we are conscious of our unity with the world and God; it is thus the sense of absolute dependence.

>On Feuerbach: Following Schleiermacher’s theses, Feuerbach thought religion was principally a matter of feeling in its unrestricted subjectivity. So the feeling breaks through all the limits of understanding and manifests itself in several religious beliefs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s88hmJ_osjY

[Anonymous No.14683478]

>>14682770
Absolute aesthetic brainlet here. Somebody explain what "aesthetic experience" is or recommend me some books on the topic, pretty please.

[Anonymous No.14683684]

>>14683478
Read Goethe

[Anonymous No.14683697]

The stars are aligned tonight, can you feel it in?

At least in Australia. Or maybe this is just part of the Karmic Illusions.

[Anonymous No.14683706]

>>14682770
>>14683697
When you see it, -it is here.

[Anonymous No.14683810]

>>14683041
This.

[Anonymous No.14684867]

>>14683253
Based

[Anonymous No.14684881]

>>14682770
There's no highest pursuit. Pursuits are cyclical. When you attain the aesthetic experience, the "high point" in meditation, the descent begins. You strive for chaos and destruction then, and these things become enjoyable to you, until you've exhausted yourself.

[Anonymous No.14685201]

>>14682770
I want to hug her and smooch her

[Anonymous No.14685222]

>>14683478
Read Adorno, Wittgenstein and the greeks